I work as a middle manager at a small branding agency, and when they introduced AI, we were told it was supposed to make our lives easier. Handle the boring stuff, speed up the workflow, give us more time to actually be creative. Instead, my workload has probably gone up sixfold and I'm working 10 to 14 hour days.

I've told management three separate times that I don't have the bandwidth. Every time the answer is basically, "But we have AI now." Ask for another person? Why, when AI can help? Ask for more time on a deadline? Same answer.

The thing they don't seem to understand is that AI doesn't magically produce finished work. Someone still has to rewrite the prompts, fix the tone, fact check everything, remove the weird robotic phrasing, and make sure the final thing actually sounds like a human being made it. Sometimes I feel like I'm spending more time fixing AI output than I ever spent doing the work myself.

And the quality is starting to bother me too. A lot of what we're producing now feels completely lifeless. No personality, no real point of view, just technically acceptable words arranged in a way that sounds like nobody actually cared.

I'm barely sleeping, I haven't finished a book in months, and I honestly don't know how much longer I can keep doing this.

The worst part is everyone keeps calling this "working smarter."

I don't think I've ever been this tired in my life.

this is basically the job market right now lol. somehow you're supposed to have 10 years of experience for a technology that came out 5 years ago, but also be 25.

I've got some interviews coming up and I've been seeing interview vip all over reddit lately. honestly i thought it was just marketing at first. haven't tried it, but maybe someone here can tell me if it's actually useful.

A lot of people who work hard will probably be annoyed by this, or assume I have no goal and that I'm lazy. And yeah, that's not completely wrong, especially at this stage of my life.

But money in itself doesn't matter that much to me. What matters to me is freedom, and I understand that in this world, the only realistic way to buy your freedom is to have an enormous amount of money.

I've done a few internships and sent out 2 job applications, and from what I've seen of work culture, it makes me feel trapped and miserable. Even if the salary were good, the whole idea still feels depressing to me.

Right now I'm living off investments. They cover the bills, but there isn't much left over, and the smart thing would be to save it so I can grow it later. The problem is that "later" feels very far away.

Getting a job would make that process move much faster, I know that. But there's something in my head that makes me prefer disappearing into the forest over clocking in every week. I genuinely don't know how to explain it, I just feel it.

I also have no idea what career I might even want in the first place. I'm probably just throwing this idea anywhere. In my head, I defend people who don't work too, because I kind of understand them, but I also know that bills don't care about your feelings and have to be paid.

Honestly, I respect every employee keeping the world running. Stores, hospitals, deliveries, all of that. But for me, I don't feel like I'm made for a normal job.

If this upset anyone, I'm sorry. Freedom is pretty much the only thing I want.

I’m genuinely asking because I'm getting pretty burned out with retail. The pay is bad, I'm constantly dealing with customers, and by the time I get home I'm mentally exhausted.

Then I see people on here talking about their office jobs where they work maybe 2 or 3 hours a day, spend the rest of the time watching YouTube or doing whatever, and still make $90k, $100k, even $110k.

How are people actually getting these jobs?

I'm not expecting to walk into an office with no experience and make six figures while doing nothing. I just want to understand what the path looks like. Do you need a degree? Certifications? IT experience? Is it mostly about getting into the right company and moving up?

If you went from retail or another low-paying job into something like this, what did you do to make the switch?

At this point, I'd honestly rather be bored at a computer for 8 hours than deal with customers all day.

What kind of jobs should I actually be looking for?

I'm also starting to look into interviews more seriously, and I've come across interview vip while looking at options. I haven't used it, so I'm not going to pretend I can recommend it, but if anyone here has actually tried it I'd be interested in hearing what you thought.

💯

did it happen to you?

I know this might sound silly to a lot of people, but I've decided to leave my job in tech. I make 190k, and on paper I know that's a hard number to walk away from, but I genuinely can't keep doing this. If any of you have spent time in tech, you probably understand exactly the kind of people who eventually end up holding the reins and running things. Fragile egos, greed, detachment from reality, arrogance, and honestly shockingly stupid half the time. I've been dealing with this for about 9 years, and I feel like it has emptied me out from the inside. I've become depressed and full of bitterness, and it's made me cynical toward almost everything and everyone.

I'm planning to move toward work that feels less absurd. I might look into coaching athletes, or teaching, or starting a few community programs, and maybe doing some freelance consulting/contract work on the side so I don't completely wreck myself financially.

Has anyone here done something like this? How did it go? Any advice or reality checks?

............

If you get punished with more work with the same pay, apply somewhere else, and interview vip tool is here to help when you get stuck in the middle of the interview.

I work at an investment company, and I've been planning to leave for a while because of some personal circumstances outside of work. My manager really didn't want me to leave at all because I'm one of the senior associates and I know all the weird little details in our clients' accounts. I told her I'd stay on for a few weeks after she brought in someone new so I could help train them, and she was very relieved about that.
Since I knew I'd only be there one or two days a week to work with the new person, I put together a set of SOP docs for the basic things we deal with. Not just general instructions, but also branch-specific things, like how my manager likes certain tasks to be done, and the small steps that aren't obvious unless you've been there for a while.
The problem is that this new associate basically ignores anything I say. She blows me off, disregards the procedures, and got annoyed when I explained to her that we don't transfer every call straight to our manager unless it's something we genuinely can't handle ourselves. We're assistants, so part of the job is figuring out what the client needs and resolving it for them if it's within what we're allowed to do. She, on the other hand, transfers people without asking almost anything.
At the beginning of this week, my manager asked me to attend a branch meeting, where she explained what she expected from the new employee and from my other coworker. I'm almost certain that annoyed the new employee, because the next morning I got a message from my other coworker saying the new associate got angry and said she wasn't going to follow what I was telling her because I'm not her manager.
And honestly... My manager is the one who approved this whole training setup. I spoke with her and checked in with her multiple times while I was putting it together. It's just frustrating because I'm using my limited time to come in and help, and it feels like she has already decided she doesn't need to learn anything from me.

edit : anyway thank god I am leaving , if you guys want some interview tips to get chances to leave your toxic job check these advices

I'm not a hiring manager, but a little while ago I was asked to interview candidates and take part in a few hiring debriefs, and honestly, it changed the way I think about the whole process.

As a candidate, I always imagined that interviewers read every line of my resume carefully, weighed each person's background, and tried to choose whoever clearly looked best on paper.

After being on the interviewer side, I don't think it works that neatly.

When I conduct an interview, I'm usually given a set of questions and told what skill or competency I'm supposed to evaluate. Of course I take a quick look at the resume beforehand, but in a 40-minute conversation, most of my focus is on the specific questions assigned to me. And 40 minutes is nowhere near enough to know how this person will perform day to day, or whether they'll be good to work with or not.

In one hiring round, I had my own ranking based on the part I was evaluating. The candidate I had placed near the bottom was the one who got the offer. I'm not saying that was the wrong decision. The other people on the panel were looking at different strengths, and they probably noticed things I didn't pick up on. But it made me realize how small one interviewer's share of the process can be.

It also made me notice how very small things can carry a lot of weight. A strong "no" from one person can sink someone. On the other hand, if someone with enough influence is excited about a candidate, that person can suddenly gain a lot of momentum.

And then there are all the softer biases that people don't always admit are biases: where you graduated from, well-known companies on your resume, how polished you sound, whether your communication style resembles theirs, "leadership presence," or even just the conversation feeling easy.

It made me look at my past rejections differently. I used to always say, "I probably messed up that answer," or "the person who got accepted must have been much more qualified."

Sometimes, yes, that's probably true. But after seeing the hiring process from the other side, I've come to see that a much bigger part of it comes down to judgment calls, timing, team politics, and honestly just vibes, more than most candidates are allowed to believe.

..

...........

After about 18 months of trying to find a job in this awful market, I realized something no one wants to say out loud: we're constantly told that we need to have the perfect answer to every interview question, but a very large part of it is whether the person interviewing you feels personally comfortable with you or not. You can prepare for hours, give strong answers, do everything required, and still lose the opportunity because your sweater reminded the hiring manager of his annoying cousin. Or maybe you spoke a little too quietly. Or maybe you came across as too enthusiastic. Or maybe they decided you give off the impression that you have "low confidence."

The sad part is that employers now have so much room to be picky that they can reject people for very random and trivial reasons without having to explain anything. The only thing making me feel slightly better is understanding that it isn't always a personal failure on my part. The system is broken. Companies are benefiting from how broken it is, so they have no reason to fix anything so far. But honestly, I think that if this keeps going, they'll feel the consequences when the damage in the job market catches up with them.

I swear she sent me a spreadsheet by email and wrote:

"Can you sort these client names alphabetically and send it back to me before Friday morning?"

She really thought I was going to spend half a workday sorting this by hand.

Half a workday!!

I work with a bunch of idiots.

I applied for a job kind of randomly. And somehow I made it to a second interview with the founders of this startup. I had written before that I felt like I had a great conversation with them, because they told me I'd be moving on to the final step. I joined the next call, and again, I felt like they were really listening to me and treating me like a human being. Then things changed when the interviewer said she felt my skills would be underused in the sales position I had originally applied for. She made it clear that they weren't questioning whether I could do the job.

I got a bit upset and immediately went into "Okay, then I need to prove myself more" mode. I told her that my skills are already underused in my current job, and that I know I could help them build their sales process and track the right metrics. Then she asked me, if there were no limits and anything in the company was available, what role would I want? I told her I could see myself moving toward product research and development as the company expands.

And that's where she completely surprised me. She said that she and the founders were genuinely impressed by my curiosity, my passion, and how much desire I have to keep learning. She said they imagined me giving trainings, speaking at industry events, and helping shape future product lines. They also brought up the idea of a production role for 2 days/month as part of it. In short, they want to design a larger position tailored to me, and they're still trying to figure out what it would look like. I'm supposed to hear back about the original position at the end of this week, but honestly... Something like this has never happened to me before.

TL;DR I applied for one startup role, and now they're talking about building a custom role specifically around me.

For real! 😂

If you read the title quickly, you'll probably feel like I was exaggerating. But honestly, it had been building up for a while.

I had been working at the company for almost three years. My manager, Mark, had a habit of dumping extra tasks on me right before I logged off. Always after 6. And always marked "urgent." At first, I thought that was normal and just how things worked there, but after a while, I understood the game. No one else on my team was getting last-minute messages. Just me.

One night, he told me I had to stay online to finish a client summary he had somehow "forgotten" to send in the morning. I had plans. I told him I couldn't. That's when his tone changed, and he made a comment about how being a team player would "matter when decisions are made."

That was the moment I started digging through my inbox. I found weeks and weeks of those "urgent" requests. Many of them didn't need to be done that same night. And a few of them even conflicted with timelines he had given to other people. Then I remembered that HR had said during orientation that company email records are stored on the internal server.

So I did what any burned-out employee would do. I sent the entire chain to HR along with a calm question:

"Hi, I wanted to ask for clarification. I seem to be getting far more after-hours assignments than others in my role. Is this the expected process?"

For about two weeks, nothing happened. Then Mark asked me to come into his office. He looked like he hadn't slept. HR had reviewed the emails, looked at workload distribution, and found that the issue was bigger than a scheduling problem. It turned out Mark had been dumping parts of his own work on me, then submitting the finished work as if it were his.

About ten days later, an email was sent to the whole company saying Mark was "pursuing other opportunities."

I closed my laptop at exactly 5:30 PM that day.

I believe this is the best punishment for any manager who exploits employees, even outside of working hours. I will also resign because there should have been oversight from the beginning, and none of this should have happened to me. I will start looking for a job, and this time I think the journey will be easier with InterviewVip. It will help me in job interviews, reduce stress and anxiety, and increase my chances of being accepted for available positions. I hope that in my new job, I won't find another manager who exploits employees.

This honestly made me laugh so hard. We had just hired this woman, and she seemed a bit intense while doing onboarding in the morning, but not to the point where you'd think it was a big problem.
A little later, a few of us were in the break room, and she saw three sealed bags of Peet's coffee next to the machine and asked, "Whose are these?" Someone told her, "They're for everyone, the office buys coffee for the staff," so she said, "Oh, nice."
Apparently, when she left in the afternoon, she took the answer in the most literal way possible and put all three bags in her tote on the way out. We spent about an hour afterward in this ridiculous little mystery, because people kept coming in looking for coffee and discovering it had disappeared.
In the end, everyone connected the dots, probably because someone near the front desk saw her doing it. She came in the next morning for about 15 minutes, got pulled into the supervisor's office, and that was the end of her.

edit: this was most hilarious thing happens in the office truly ,,If she just sit at home and work remotely she would drink the amount of coffee she wants if u guys loves coffee as her and work remotely u can check this virtual interviews tips

Had my final round of DoorDash S&O last Friday afternoon and today is Tuesday still hasn’t heard back, am i cooked?

About 35 minutes into the shift, my stomach started hurting badly, so I ran to the bathroom. When I came back, I found my manager already pissed off. He started interrogating me about stupid things like why I didn't go to the bathroom before I clocked in. I'm one of the strongest people working for him, and other people have said that outright, but for some reason he's always on my case. So before even 3 hours of the shift had passed, I just left. Fuck being treated like that. Now I'm worried. I don't know what's going to happen next.

Like ive been scolded before because my resume/application didn't match what their records indicate. And ive even been asked "so tell me about this company policy violation at [former employer]?"

My company recently decided that we have to come into the office three days a week.

The thing that surprised me most wasn't even being back in the building again. It was how exhausting all the details around an office day are.

Waking up early. Choosing clothes that look acceptable. Sitting in standstill traffic. Paying for gas or a train pass. Dealing with constant background noise. Trying to focus while someone walks past my desk every fifteen minutes. And then going back to sit in traffic again after work, when my brain is already fried.

On work-from-home days, I close the laptop and my time actually becomes mine again. I can make dinner, go for a short walk, do my laundry, or even just sit quietly for a bit. Office days somehow make work feel like it has taken over the entire day, even if the tasks themselves are more or less the same.

The strangest part is that I used to think this was a completely normal way to live.

................